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Who Is This Hornswoggler?

Andrew Wheeler is a Vassar alum, class of 1990. He spent 16 years as a bookclub editor (mostly for the Science Fiction Book Club), and then moved into marketing. He marketed books and related products to accountants for Wiley for eight years, and now works for Thomson Reuters as Senior Marketer for Corporate Counsel. He was a judge for the 2005 World Fantasy Awards and the 2008 Eisner Awards. He also reviewed a book a day for a year twice. He lives with The Wife and two mostly tame sons (Thing One, born 1998; and Thing Two, born 2000) at an unspecified location in suburban New Jersey. He has been known to drive a minivan, and nearly all of his writings are best read in a tone of bemused sarcasm. Antick Musings’s manifesto is here. All opinions expressed here are entirely and purely those of Andrew Wheeler, and no one else.

Friday, October 04, 2013

With the fourth Parker novel, Richard Stark almost lets his series character get back to his usual life: he goes from his usual between-jobs life as a man of leisure lounging on beaches attached to resort hotels and having his way with women attracted to dangerous men to a well-paid, well-organized job stealing a large sum of money from a man who can't report the theft, along with other professionals he knows and trusts.

Of course, it's never that easy for Parker: the money is just the sweetener, and he's being forced to do the job by Bett Harrow -- one of those women he had his way with, and who stole away a gun that could put him in serious danger -- and her rich, romantic father. Bett wants a tough man who will do whatever she says; old man Harrow wants a unique, priceless French statue looted from a fifteenth-century tomb several revolutions ago and now in the collection of the larcenous Washington emissary of a minor Communist country. Bett will bribe and blackmail Parker; her father will agree to pay more than he expected. But, still, Parker is forced into a job he might have walked away from otherwise.

On the other side, that emissary, Lepas Kapor, has been planning to disappear for a while, and has been slowly siphoning off as much of his country's money as he could -- with as much as $100,000 in 1963 currency stashed in his Washington, DC home when Parker heads north from Miami to steal it. But Harrow isn't the only one with an eye on Kapor; his masters back on the other side of the Iron Curtain have realized his theft and sent a man of impeccable record, Auguste Menlo, to liquidate Kapor and retrieve the money. And that plan would be as foolproof as Parker's, but for two things: first, the competing plan of Parker's, and second, that Menlo, like all men, can only be trusted so far -- and $100,000 of cash in the wide-open capitalist USA is well over that line.

Menlo's and Parker's plans collide from the first page of The Mourner, though the reader doesn't know that yet -- as he does so often, Stark leads with action and fills in the background later, slipping back from the immediate danger to Parker and his partner Handy McKay to the set-up of the job and then sideways to Menlo and his temptations. And the heist is only the middle of the novel, and only the mid-point of the schemes, double-crosses, and deals the characters engage in.

Stark, as is becoming common in this series, tells entire sections away from Parker's point of view -- and even his presence -- to give more life to the minor and passing characters and to place Parker more solidly in a larger world. Stark isn't satisfied with telling the same story over again; The Mourner is more than slightly a novel of international intrigue -- as seen from the viewpoints of outsiders like Parker and Menlo -- not all that far away from Fleming and Le Carre.

But that's the strength of Parker as a character: he's so pure, so much himself, that he can move into any American milieu -- I don't believe Stark ever sent him outside the country, and for good reason -- and be entirely true to his nature, as cold-blooded and precise and clear-eyed no matter what's going on around him. And that makes these books live, even fifty years later -- the world is different, but Parker is as iconic and individual as ever, moving through American society like a shark.